The
depressing documentary about a rush to
judgment over one of NYC's most notorious and
heinous crimes, at a time in the 1980s under Mayor
Koch when there was a crime wave and racial tensions
were at a breaking point, aims to set the record
straight about that unforgettable gut-checking
incident.

It's
competently directed, written and produced by Ken
Burns, his daughter Sarah and her husband
David McMahon, with an added agenda to show that the
police investigation was inadequate.
Ms. Burns' 2011 book
“The Central Park Five” states that the five
teenagers had been in the park that night, with a
gang of about 30 kids who violently attacked a
number of people that night. They revisit, in all
the ugly details, the tragic events that
occurred on the night of April 19, 1989 when a
white female jogger was found in the underbrush of
Central Park clad only in a bra, nearly beaten to
death, sexually assaulted, and her skull cracked.
Later the jogger is identified as Trisha
Meili, a 28-year-old investment banker, who
when she miraculously comes out of her coma has no
memory of the incident. What's clear on this same
night, the park had a number of incidents of
"wilding"--wolf-packs attacking citizens at random. As
a result five teens were picked up in the park for
wilding and brought to the police station for
questioning, and would be eventually accused of the
crime.

Through
interviews with the five Harlem black and Hispanic
teens, all between 14 and 16, and the use of montages,
we look back at how the police through a rough
pressured interrogation get confessions and that
results in the innocent teens (innocent of the vicious
rape, but probably guilty of violently harassing
others in the park) being charged with the crime and
when some are tried a year later and others in a
second trial, all get convicted despite no proof of
their DNA at the crime scene or other facts to
corroborate their participation in the crime. The
press never questioned the discrepancies in the police
story and the enraged public was filled with shock,
hatred and fear, and would have lynched the demonized
five if it were back in the day. The convicted teens
served out their sentences of six to thirteen years,
and the last felon is released in 2002. While
they were in prison Matias Reyes, a
psychopathic violent career criminal imprisoned with
them in the Auburn Prison, known as the East Side
rapist, confessed to other prisoners that he was the
guilty party who committed the Central Park rape. When
Reyes is investigated, the police gather new evidence
about the crime that only the culprit who committed
the crime would know and discover his DNA is a match.
The judges, under DA Morgenthau's consent, drop all
the charges against the boys.

The
Central Park Five lacks drama and is such a gloomy
subject that it's difficult to watch because it brings
back so many bad memories, nevertheless the story
still has power and relevancy because of the brutality
of the crime and that it had such an adverse effect on
the city by depicting that the system failed to work
when the press, judicial system and police didn't do
their job. Even today the police and justice
department won't apologize for railroading the teens
and the press will not admit to its mistake of taking
what the police presented at face value without asking
questions.

The
Central Park Five have a civil law suit filed against
the city, that still hasn't been resolved.There's
still a bitterness over the case because it suggests
racism, among other things about a city that seemed
uncivilized. The victim as well as the city and the
teens were left with permanent scars that can't be
resolved by a mere film at this late date.